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Whether or not you properly deice and anti-ice an airplane can mean the difference between life and death for the passengers and crew. I had the opportunity to create several eLearning courses for a client in the aeronautics industry and in this lesson, they had me to create this scenario to bring home the importance of the deicing/anti-icing process.

This week’s eLearning challenge was to create a Branching Scenario following Tom Kuhlmann’s three Cs of Challenge, Choices, and Consequences. Branching scenarios give the learner an opportunity to practice what you’ve been teaching them in a real life situation where there are numerous actions to choose from.

For each incorrect and correct decision, you can give the learner feedback including telling them what could/would happen as a consequence of their decision. And you can give them the opportunity to retry as many times as it takes for them to get it right.

These scenarios are really very simple interactions to build. Each choice links up to a different branch where you can give them feedback. Branching scenarios can also get more complicated if you decide to branch more than once. For example, if you had a scenario with more than one decision that had to be made along the way. Like a tree, each time you branch off, you exponentially increase the number of feedback paths you need to create, and some of those paths can even take the learner back to a previous slide in the scenario.

I suggest if at all possible keeping to just two or three options each time they have to make a choice, and to keep the number of decision points to the minimum you can get away with. These scenarios should also be brief as possible. You’ll notice I set up this scenario with a minimum of background information to get right to the point. So, check it out here and let me know what you think.

Like an onion, too many layers can make an e-learning developer cry. You’re creating an e-learning lesson in Storyline and your client has a number of slides with multiple layers. Your client requires that the learner visit all of the layers on each slide before they can advance to the next.

Normally you’d disable the Next button in the Storyline player so that it won’t work until all the layers have been visited, or you have a customized Next or Continue button on the slide itself with an initial hidden state that switches to Normal after the learner has visited all the layers.

Each red dot reveals a separate layer, that’s 10 layers!

True/False Variables
To accomplish this, you create a separate True/False variable for each layer and when the timeline begins on each layer, or when learners exit each layer, you have a trigger that switches each variable to True. Well, it’s easy to see that if you have a lot of layers and a lot of slides with layers, you could end up with 100+ variables to create. Fortunately, there is a much better way, and it works!

Number Variables
Instead of creating True/False variables for every layer, create 1 Number variable. Let’s say you have 10 layers, simply create a Number variable (I’d name it after the slide you’re on, but you can call it anything) with an initial value of 0.

Why Greater Than or Equal To?
Then add a trigger on each layer to add 1 to the numbered variable you just created. And finally, on the base layer, add a trigger which says to change the Next button to normal when that variable is greater than or equal to 10.

In case the learner decides to visit one or more of the layers more than once before advancing to the next slide, it’s a good idea to use the “greater than or equal to” setting on the trigger. Also, if you try to set up this trigger, you’ll notice you don’t immediately have the option to set the value of the variable, you can only change it, uh oh!

Not to worry, you just set the variable to change, then you Add + a Condition that says the variable is greater than or equal to 10 and you’re done.

Click + and add a trigger condition

Disabling the Next Button
In case you don’t know how to do this, you can add a trigger on the base layer that says to disable the Next button at a certain point on the timeline. I usually set it to be disabled within the first second. You can do this by either entering the time (When Timeline Reaches) or adding a cue point to the timeline and setting the trigger to disable the Next button when it reaches the cue point.

If you’re using a customized button, and not the one on the Storyline player, just set the initial state of the button to Hidden, and have it change to Normal after the variable has reached 10 or more (or whatever value you need based on the number of layers).

It’s also important to make sure all the triggers are in the correct order to work. In my lesson, I have the trigger to disable the Next button appear ABOVE the trigger to change it to Normal.

I hope I made this all very clear and easy to understand, but let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Ah, my Disney obsession continues. This week’s e-learning challenge was to create an interaction using Storyline’s Lightbox feature. Designers like to use lightboxes when they want learners to be able to look at an outside reference without leaving the slide they’re on. The reference might be talking about how to use the navigation features on the course or perhaps to define key terms used throughout the course. Lightboxes are great because they can be accessed from anywhere in the course and don’t have to be included in the Menu.

Living with the Land
Being a lover of exotic fruit trees and gardening, I have always enjoyed EPCOT’s Living with the Land ride at Disney Orlando. LWTL takes you on a boat ride starting you off in a life-size diorama (or what I’d call biorama) taking you through various climatic regions from rainforests to deserts to prairies.

Geodesic Dome
After that short ecological history, the boat emerges from the dark diorama into the bright sunlight of its dome-enclosed orchard & garden area. Here you can see a multitude of exotic plantlife: vanilla, dragon fruit, Carolina reaper (one of the hottest peppers in the world), Buddha’s hand, jack fruit, and bananas growing all around you.

You’ll also see experiments in hydroponic and self-sustaining ecosystems. After you exit the ride, you will find a little booth selling starter plants created in their labs. I bought a couple dragon fruit plants which are thriving to this day (although I have to keep them in pots so I can wheel them into our garage when temps get too low. You can also arrange a behind-the-scenes tour of the LWTL gardens and lab to learn more. It’s actually quite inexpensive and we learned a lot.

The Build
I didn’t do anything fancy here, just concentrated on getting some beautiful images and embedded one video from YouTube. These were all put onto separate slides and then I added triggers to the oval-shaped navigation saying to open those slides as lightboxes when the user clicks on them. Finally, in case you were wondering, I used a piece of original music I wrote for the introduction slide that seemed to fit the mood. Check it out here and let me know what you think.

Do you love to graze on a variety of delectable foods from all over the globe? Are you a garden and topiary lover? Do you jump at the chance to play unusual and exotic musical instruments in outdoor environments? If any of these things get a rise out of you, you’re going to love this Articulate Rise course.

Articulate 360 includes Storyline and Studio which I’ve already worked with for years, but I have never built a course in Rise. So after watching a few instructional videos presented by Tom Kuhlmann, I decided to just dive in and start creating my first Rise course.

Image Options
There are a LOT of ways you can present images in Rise, and being that this course is about one of the most visually-stunning topics, the Flower and Garden Festival at Epcot, I explored a couple of them – the carousel and the flip card interaction.

Carousel Interaction

One very nice time-saver I learned about from Tom Kuhlmann was how to use PowerPoint to set the aspect ratio / dimensions of the pictures and export them all as PNGs so you end up with nice, consistent images. For the carousel above, I used the standard 16×9 aspect ratio and for the flip card interaction, the 1×1 was a perfect fit.

Video Options
You can also both import and embed videos into Rise. So I grabbed a video shot by e-learning hero Jackie Van Nice of yours truly playing a marimba type instrument in one of the outdoor garden interactions at the festival. Man, was that a blast.

Imported Video of me in my silly cowboy hat playing the ??? (open course to play video)

For the butterfly garden section, I found a wonderful YouTube video describing the exhibit and embedded it into the course.

So I have to admit, there are no new, earth-shattering, thinking-outside-of-the-box ideas here on how to present images and video in Rise, it’s my first course after all, but it really is a fun interactive course which I think you’ll enjoy. Maybe I’ll run into you at the next festival. Check the course out here.

If you’ve ever witnessed a plague of lighthouse keepers or traversed the topographic oceans only to find yourself in the court of the crimson king, you may appreciate what I created for this week’s Articulate e-learning challenge.

Our MC, David Anderson asked us to create an e-learning interaction that used awards and/or progress bars in a creative way to reward learners and show them how far they’ve gotten in a lesson. Well, I thought this challenge being about progress bars, I should create the ultimate PROGress bar (ie: progressive rock, get it?).

So many times when I’ve seen documentaries about popular music or the 1970s in particular, all they ever talk about is punk and disco and totally miss the fact that the major progressive rock bands were selling millions of records and packing the hugest stadiums in the world. It was what Bill Martin aptly labelled a “popular avant garde.”

The PROGress Bar
For my progress bar, I decided to have seven levels of achievement with an illustrious title for each; ranging from Prog Novice to Prog God. I used the sun from the cover of King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic to denote where the learner was in the different levels. So the suns go along the bottom in a row with all of them grayed out except for the current level the learner is on.

Hint, Hint
Knowing that a deep knowledge of progressive rock is generally not the forte’ of most people and that my audience was going to be mostly other e-learning designers, I didn’t want them to get discouraged and opt out of the lesson right away. To remedy this, I added obvious hints to the feedback layer of the questions and gave them two tries to get the right answer.

Being the serious prog-nerd that I am, I had too many questions. Anyone who knows me personally knows I can go on and on about this topic. When I was done, I realized that I HAD to have at least one extra question. So it made sense that to get all the way to Prog God, that the learner should have to answer an additional question to get that ultimate title. To represent where they were at in the lesson, I highlighted one half of the final sun on the PROGress bar.

Original Music
For anyone who’s interested, the music on the introductory slide is a piece I wrote and recorded called “Satisfaction.” It was supposed to be one of those epic 20 minute tunes, but is yet to be completed. At any rate, enjoy the lesson and definitely let me know what you think!

As Sun Ra used to say, “Space is the place” and I wholeheartedly agree. Thanks to some adventurous souls who conceived of, built and operated the numerous successful spacecraft which have revealed to us Titan’s, Io’s and Europa’s secrets, we not only have some beautiful images of our celestial neighbors, but have added immensely to our knowledge and understanding of these remarkable and exotic worlds.

Adaptive Learning Paths
When creating e-learning lessons, you always want to think about your audience and their needs. Often learners have different levels of knowledge and experience. How can you create a lesson that adapts to their different skill levels, so you don’t waste the more-experienced learners’ time going over a bunch of information they already know?

E-learning designers have created adaptive learning paths (or ALPs) to accommodate these different learners’ needs. In this week’s e-learning challenge, David Anderson from Articulate asked us to create an example of an ALP.

Asking Questions First
First you have to assess where the learner’s knowledge level is at. The most common approach is to simply ask them a series of questions, and then based on their answers, only direct them to the parts of the lesson where they need help. In my example, I asked them three questions.

Confidence Levels
Sometimes learners will answer a question correctly by chance without really knowing the answer. I noticed one of my fellow designers, Jackie Van Nice had added confidence levels into her submission. So I added that feature, but to keep mine simpler, I only gave them two confidence-level options to choose from, either they’re certain they know the answer or they aren’t.

Under the Hood
So how did I make it work? I used a combination of states, variables and triggers.

Each question had three possible answers. Each answer had two states; Normal and Selected. The Selected state had an outline around it so learners would know they had it selected. Also, each of the two confidence levels had Normal and Selected states.

Secondly, I created three variables, each named after the moon being talked about in the questions; Europa, Titan and Io. All three variables were True/False variables with the initial state set to False.

Finally, I created simple check marks on the summary slide that would appear on top of each section of the lesson. All three check marks had two states: Hidden and Normal. If the learner needed to review the section, the check mark would appear (Normal), but if they already knew the material and did NOT need to review the section, the check mark would be Hidden.

I then added triggers to each of the three check marks. So the Europa check mark for example, would have a trigger set to hide it if the correct answer on the Europa question was selected AND the “I got this” confidence-level was selected. Because in that instance, the learner both got the question right and was sure of their answer, and thus didn’t need to review the Europa section.

After I set the triggers for the three check marks, I thought I better add a fourth trigger for those learners who didn’t need to review any of the lesson because they already had it all mastered. In that instance a box would appear telling them so. That box had two states; Normal and an initial Hidden state. I then set a trigger so that the box would only appear (change to Normal) if all three of the variables were set to True.

I’ve done enough talking, check out the lesson here and let me know what you think! I’d also like to thank Jackie Van Nice for sharing with me her transparent Storyline player to create this lesson, that was real time-saver!

This week, David Anderson’s Articulate E-learning Challenge was to create an engaging software simulation. I used Storyline to create two software simulations, one which also gives the learners the opportunity to try it out themselves and a second one which merely demonstrates what to do, but also adds a closed captioning element for the hearing impaired.

Video Editing Software Simulation
Pinnacle Studio allows you to edit video professionally at a low cost. I created this demo to show users how to use their player and then gives them the opportunity to try it out themselves. Try it out here.

Video Editing Software Simulation

For more information on how I created the simulation, visit my previous blog post.

Map Tools Demo with Closed Captioning
I designed this software demonstration/tutorial with closed captioning for Texas Parks and Wildlife. To make the course accessible to people with both hearing and visual limitations, I added closed captioning at the bottom of the screen and also used Storyline’s built in option to name all the graphics on the screen. You can view it here.

Map Tools Demonstration with Closed Captioning

To read about how to add closed captioning to a Storyline e-learning course, visit my previous blog post about it.